7 Common Mistakes when Choosing Paint Colors

Painting your interior walls is a cost-effective way to give your home a tremendous uplift. It’s not as simple as grabbing a can of paint and a brush and throwing some tarp to cover the furniture. One of the most important considerations is choosing a paint color that you’ll be happy with for a long time to come. Anyone who has had the experience of trying to choose a shade probably knows that the sheer abundance of options in colors can be intimidating. The following tips can help.

3 Mistaken Methods for Choosing Paint Color

There are some typical approaches to choosing paint color that professionals would never recommend. The following are three of them:

1. When choosing a paint color, many people fail to take furniture and décor into consideration. You could end up with a less than satisfactory result, if the paint color clashes with your couch or other décor. Your choice of paint color is much more likely to be successful if you first test to see whether it complements various objects in the room.

2. Tiny paint swatches are often used to judge paint colors and how they would look in a room. Experts say it’s not possible to get a true sense of how a color will look using paint swatches. Instead, it’s best to paint large areas on various parts of the walls, where light hits the room differently. In the alternative, you could paint poster board and move it around a room in different lighting and at different times of the day and night to get the best feel for how the shade looks.

3. Choosing a color in generalities based on room décor can be a mistake. For example, you may want a gray room, but there are many paint shades of gray. By not testing the color with room décor and lighting, you could end up with a room that has disharmony. It could also end up looking dull, if the lighting is inadequate to bring out the best in the shade chosen.

1. Dark paint colors may be chosen when a bold statement in design is desired. This often turns out to be a mistake because there isn’t an adequate amount of natural light in the room. Without the benefit of the sunlight, what is meant to be dramatic verve creates a claustrophobic effect, instead.

2. Colors can create special effects. For instance, lighter walls and a light ceiling cause a space to feel larger than it is. This particular effect can go wrong when stark white is the paint color chosen for a small space that has very little natural light. Dark spaces tend to appear dreary and dirty when painted white. A much better choice is to add color to the walls.

3. Assess the room you’re going to paint. If it has light but also a lot of shadows, choosing a dark shade would be a mistake because the shadows will further darken the appearance of the color. Instead, choose a brighter shade.

4. A mistake that could be too obvious to ignore is painting two parts of an open floor plan in starkly different colors. Perhaps when this is done, the idea is create the effect of separating the space into different rooms. It doesn’t work and will look worse than amateurish, especially if the paint colors aren’t paired on the color wheel.

As mentioned at the beginning, this is just one of the major kinds of mistakes people frequently make when painting their home interiors. Other mistakes include using the wrong equipment and failing to do the detailed prep work required to achieve a professional finish. The best option for ensuring an optimal outcome to your interior paint project is to call our skilled professionals at Franklin Painting. Call us at (877) 646-7774.